I no longer remember when I first heard about Wallace and Gromit, characters in three animated shorts made with stop motion animation. The characters have become very popular and are much loved. They appeared in a full length movie, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, in 2005. At that point, I hadn't seen any of the animated shorts with the characters. I recently found the DVD Wallace & Gromit - Three Amazing Adventures and picked it up. The DVD contains all of the animated shorts.

In A Grand Day Out, Wallace and Gromit were trying to decide where to go on a vacation. After discovering that he was completely out of cheese, Wallace decided that they should travel to the moon since everyone knew it was made of cheese. Wallace and Gromit build a rocket and head off on their adventure.

In The Wrong Trousers, Wallace invented techno-trousers for Gromit’s birthday. The techno-trousers could talk Gromit on walks while Wallace stayed in the house. Wallace decided to rent out a room to a penguin who never talked and who took over Gromit’s room. Gromit noticed the penguin doing some very suspicious things that turned out to be part of a bigger plan.

Wallace and Gromit have set up a window washing business in A Close Shave. Wallace is drawn to Wendolene, a woman who owned a wool shop. She had a menacing dog named Preston. Wallace and Gromit were pulled into a mystery involving a wool shortage, sheep rustling and a sheep named Shaun.

All three of the animated shorts on Wallace & Gromit - Three Amazing Adventures had Wallace and Gromit having some sort of adventure. A Grand Day Out just had them going on a vacation, even though they did pick a unique destination. The other two involved a bit of mystery and had Wallace and Gromit pulled into some sort of crimes. They mysteries weren’t complicated, but they still helped make the movie entertaining. Gromit figured out what was going on sooner than Wallace.

Each of the three animated shorts had unique plots and they could stand alone very well. There were a few small things that tied back into the previous ones a few times. Because of those things, I do think it would best to watch the shorts in the order they were made and released. I talked about them in that order. For whatever reason, they were arranged in reverse order on the DVD.

A Grand Day Out was 23 minutes long and the other two were 30 minutes long. Since they were shorter, that did limit how developed the plots could be since there was a limited amount of time to work with. I thought the plots for all three of the animated shorts were interesting, entertaining, and developed well. A Grand Day Out probably had the simplest of the plots since there really wasn’t any mystery added in like there was for the other two. There were a few scenes when I wasn’t sure what would happen next and I felt like it was a very interesting, entertaining story. Since it was the first of the shorts, it did start to establish the characters. That carried into the next two shorts where it was built on. Wallace’s love of cheese came up and it was shown that Wallace continued to invent and depend on Gromit to get him out of messes. I did feel like all three of the plots fit together well even though they told different stories.

All three of the shorts were created with stop motion animation. That is a very long process since the models of the characters are moved only a tiny amount and everything is filmed one frame at a time. That does produce a final product that can be a bit more jerky than other forms of animation. I didn’t think that was a problem for these shorts. The first one made, A Grand Day Out, did have a slightly rougher look than the other two, but it was still very well done. As the filmmakers made the future shorts, they got better at what they were doing which did result in finished products that had a smoother, more polished look. If the shorts are viewed in order, people can see how the animation improved. I do think that things just looked a bit better in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Since the characters were made of clay, there were times when I could see fingerprints on them.

Wallace and Gromit were the main characters in all three of the shorts. They were the only characters in most of A Grand Day Out. Once they arrived on the moon, they met the unique third character. Wallace was the only character who said anything for the first two shorts. Wendolene, the owner of the wool shop in A Close Shave, became the first character other than Wallace to speak. Wallace enjoyed inventing things and those things got him in trouble more than once. He tended to look to Gromit to fix things when that happened. It was clear that Gromit was loyal to Wallace, but he did get a bit annoyed or frustrated by some of the things that Wallace did. They are very likable, fun characters. The only other characters were the penguin and Wendolene’s dog Preston. All of the non-speaking characters were still able to convey emotions though their expressions. Peter Sallis did the voice for Wallace in all three of the shorts. His voice fit the character perfectly.

DVD Information

This DVD has audio commentary on all three of the shorts that I haven’t listened to yet. There were two featurettes on the making of the shorts as well as two episodes of Shaun the Sheep. The copy that I recently found was released in December of 2007. I know there was at least one previous version of this DVD. I have no idea if that version has the same extras or not.

Wallace & Gromit - Three Amazing Adventures is a very fun, entertaining DVD that fans of Wallace and Gromit should enjoy.

Animated Movie Reviews
101 Dalmatians ~ Aladdin ~ The Ant Bully ~ Antz ~ The Aristocats ~ Barnyard ~ Beauty and the Beast ~ Bee Movie ~ Best Computer Animated Movies ~ Brother Bear ~ A Bug's Life ~ Cars ~ Chicken Little ~ Doctor Strange ~ The Emperor's New Groove ~ Finding Nemo ~ Flushed Away ~ Happy Feet ~ Home on the Range ~ Hoodwinked ~ Horton Hears a Who ~ Ice Age ~ Ice Age: The Meltdown ~ The Incredibles ~ Invincible Iron Man ~ Jetsons: The Movie ~ Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius ~ Lilo & Stitch ~ Looney Tunes: Back in Action ~ Madagascar ~ Meet the Robinsons ~ Monster House ~ Monsters, Inc. ~ The Nightmare Before Christmas ~ Open Season ~ Over the Hedge ~ The Polar Express ~ Ratatouille ~ Robots ~ Shark Tale ~ Shrek ~ Shrek 2 ~ Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas ~ Sleeping Beauty ~ Tim Burton's Corpse Bride ~ TMNT ~ Toy Story ~ Toy Story 2 ~ Treasure Planet ~ Ultimate Avengers ~ Valiant ~ Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit ~ The Wild ~


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD